Generally I agree with your view, but there are real hiring problems that have to be solved first.
>if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over.
If 50 developers apply for a job and 3 of them are from MIT and 47 are from lesser known schools, using the MIT signal as a filter is efficient. If $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal. Of course there are other filters too. Previous employers is an important one. You can create comprehensive professional examinations like they do in medicine, where a passing grade is a major achievement. But these don't scale well because the more they scale the easier it is to cheat, especially if the risks of getting caught cheating are minor (i.e. there aren't previous barriers that must be overcome via investment of time in other institutions first).
The other dynamic of top schools is the networking effect. There is real value in concentrating thousands of the "best and brightest" together in one place and bouncing them off each other. It doesn't scale, which is both a problem (for qualified people who are excluded for whatever reason) and a benefit (for those who participate, there is value in the scarcity).
As someone who's had the opportunity to go through a pile of 100+ resumes and have met people who have gone to Ivy League (or other top technical schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, etc) I definitely do not put too much weight on education (even for new grads). As a software engineer I'd rather put weight on their projects and accomplishments. I've seen a lot of students from prestigious schools with high GPAs who completely bomb the in person interviews.
I actually think it's a bit more complicated than that. For a large company trying to fill a ton of openings, I think where you went to college is actually an even more important filtering criteria (ie an Ivy League degree is almost an automatic pass from resume to phone screen), but the list of colleges that get a near automatic pass is larger.
What do you mean by "throughput" and how do you measure it ahead of an interview? Given 50 resumes for an open position, how do you select whom to interview? Does your process scale to many dozens or hundreds of open positions per year?
>if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over.
If 50 developers apply for a job and 3 of them are from MIT and 47 are from lesser known schools, using the MIT signal as a filter is efficient. If $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal. Of course there are other filters too. Previous employers is an important one. You can create comprehensive professional examinations like they do in medicine, where a passing grade is a major achievement. But these don't scale well because the more they scale the easier it is to cheat, especially if the risks of getting caught cheating are minor (i.e. there aren't previous barriers that must be overcome via investment of time in other institutions first).
The other dynamic of top schools is the networking effect. There is real value in concentrating thousands of the "best and brightest" together in one place and bouncing them off each other. It doesn't scale, which is both a problem (for qualified people who are excluded for whatever reason) and a benefit (for those who participate, there is value in the scarcity).